AUTHOR ARCHIVES

James Kitfield

James Kitfield a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of the Presidency & Congress and a Defense One contributor. He is a former senior correspondent for National Journal and has written on defense, national security and foreign policy issues from Washington, D.C. for more than two decades.

April 1, 2000
jkitfield@nationaljournal.com nly a few days into Operation Allied Force in the Balkans last year, warning alarms began to sound inside the Pentagon about media coverage of the war. At least one 24-hour television news channel was broadcasting live video of U.S. warplanes taking off from their bases, potentially giving Serbian ...

February 15, 2000
Perhaps not since John F. Kennedy has a presidential candidate spoken as compellingly to the core values and aspirations of the U.S. military as John McCain. Certainly fellow Republicans Bob Dole and George Bush were genuine war heroes, but their struggle in World War II was of an older generation ...

August 15, 1999
jkitfield@njdc.com eriods of war and strife often have reshaped the way Americans view national security, shaking them out of complacency and dramatically changing the normal cycle of weapons procurement. So it was this year, as two major news events galvanized opinion in Washington behind major increases in spending and production ...

August 15, 1999
jkitfield@njdc.com efense Department officials are anxiously awaiting the long-anticipated moment known among some experts simply as "midnight crossing." It will arrive first in the Aleutian Islands as the clock strikes midnight in the western Pacific Dec. 31. Pentagon officials will be watching closely on the computer screens of a planned ...

August 15, 1999
jkitfield@govexec.com hen NATO announced a cease-fire in Operation Allied Force in Yugoslavia in June, Pentagon officials punctuated the victory by showing reporters detailed video of Serbian troops exiting the province of Kosovo in troop transports. It was a rare moment in the annals of modern warfare. For the first time, ...

August 15, 1999
jkitfield@njdc.com espite the high-tech warfare that NATO waged in the skies over Yugoslavia earlier this year, the U.S. aircraft that were the vanguard of Operation Allied Force are generally more than a decade old. Most represent technology that dates back to the 1970s and 1960s. Some of the B-52 bombers ...

July 26, 1999
If wars help define nations, the image of America mirrored in the recent Balkan War is of a country both preternaturally strong and deeply conflicted. There's little argument that the United States and its NATO allies fought and won a just war. That they did it solely from the air ...

July 6, 1999
When retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey became the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy in 1996, he inherited one of the most thankless jobs in government. Though he held a Cabinet-level position, the "drug czar" was viewed as a largely ceremonial figure and a lightning rod for ...

April 23, 1999
Not since the tense days of its birth during the Berlin Blockade of 1949 has NATO confronted a moment so charged with both promise and peril as this one. The danger then was infinitely greater, yet somehow easier to understand. Even as Secretary of State Dean Acheson and other Western ...

April 5, 1999
In a spectacle that has almost become armchair routine, U.S. military forces continue to hurl destruction on Serbian forces from a dizzying pinnacle of technological superiority. Modern bombs are guided to their targets by a unique constellation of spy and navigational satellites, advanced cruise missiles, and stealth aircraft-weapons that no ...